July 22 news: Children injured by TV’s, H7N9, deadly estrogen therapy

BBC – More US children injured by falling televisions – studyFalling television sets have injured nearly 200,000 children in the US over 20 years, a study has found.Most injuries were not serious, and only 2.6% required hospital admission, the study in the journal Pediatrics says.

The Sacramento Bee – Sacramento County one of state’s hotbeds for sexually transmitted diseases
Here’s what public health officials are saying about Sacramento County’s persistently high rates of sexually transmitted disease: “From bad to worse,” “alarmingly shocking,” “unacceptable.”Sacramento had the third-highest rate of gonorrhea cases among the state’s 58 counties in 2012.

Red Orbit – Ferret study shows H7N9 could transmit between humansThe H7N9 bird flu strain that broke out in China earlier this year, sickening more than 130 and resulting in at least 43 deaths, has so far remained largely non-transmissible between humans. Regardless, that has been one of the most pressing questions to date, with fears that a move to human-to-human transmissions could spark a global pandemic.

Los Angeles Times – Avoiding estrogen therapy proved deadly for nearly 50,000: studyHormone replacement therapy has plummeted among U.S. women since the Women’s Health Initiative cut short its Estrogen Plus Progestin Trial in 2002, when study results revealed that women who took the two-hormone therapy suffered adverse effects and higher mortality.But the widespread rejection since of all hormone replacement therapies among menopausal women has been misguided, a team of researchers from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., wrote Thursday in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

The Pump Handle – Sequestration claims another public health program: The Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance programWhen I asked Teresa Schnorr why we should be worried about the loss of a little-known occupational health data gathering program, she quoted a popular saying in the field of surveillance: “What gets counted, gets done.”Schnorr, who serves as director of the Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations and Field Studies at CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), was referring to the Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program (ABLES), a state-based effort that collects and analyzes data on adult lead exposure.